Call Them Feminist Press

Reports online are increasing about projects in the creative industries aimed not only at countering fear of the ‘other’ and resentment about the growing number of ‘others’ in our midst but at highlighting ways ‘others’ enrich and strengthen us. As nationalism and nativism rise across the globe, my cyber world is under siege. I am not complaining. Powerful images posted online from art biennials have stayed with me: Venice, Berlin, Dak’Art (Dakar,Senegal) and Art X in Lagos, Nigeria. Memorable, startling art, love-infused,aiming to transform the way I, we, see all kinds of difference: gender, race,culture, ability. Rarely can art claim immediate transformative power; what it can do is capture the imagination and plant seeds for a conversation and perhaps – ultimately – a conversion.

In this essay, I turn my thoughts away from arresting visual art to focus on a landmark union: Margaret Busby OBE with Candida Lacey of Myriad Editions (UK) and 200+ women from Africa and her Diasporas. It is a great literary assembly put together for the purpose of reconstructing perceptions about Africa and her women; celebrating African women in literature and showcasing the dazzling range of their work. Importantly the women have assembled for the purpose of making a difference in black women’s lives through the inauguration of The Margaret Busby New Daughters of Africa Award. Myriad Editions’ Press Release explains that the £20,000 award has been made possible by the support of School of Oriental and African Studies and the generosity of the writers who each waived their usual fees. The award will support a black woman who has been offered a place on the Master of Arts (MA) programme at the SOAS in African Studies, Comparative Literature or Translation (in African languages). The candidate must be African and must have a particular interest in studying African literature.

My
first meeting with Margaret Busby (Nana Akua Ackon), seems a long time ago now.
A reading event held at Terra Kulture, the Nigerian Cultural Centre to promote the Etisalat Prize for Literature, then in its second edition,
but recently dormant (though an immensely popular and useful prize). Busby was
an active patron. Born in Ghana to parents with Caribbean links, she achieved
renown in 1967, when with Clive Allison, she co-founded Allison & Busby
whose author list featured such notables as Nuruddin Farah (Somalia), Ishmael
Reed (USA), Carlos Moore (Cuba) and Buchi Emecheta (Nigeria). She was the
youngest and first black female publisher in the United Kingdom. She left
Allison & Busby in 1987 and achieved renowned as a broadcaster (radio &
TV); as a playwright (radio & stage) and as the woman who gave us Daughters of Africa (1992), the magnum opus and seminal anthology that provided a platform for ‘Words and Writings by Women of African Descent from the Ancient Egyptian to the Present’.

We owe Margaret Busby an immense debt of gratitude for this 1992 work. Its chronological arrangement - by date of birth - enables us, to quote her, ‘to try to chart the development of a literary canon over the years, to restore links and show the continuity of expression that against all odds still exists in much of the material’. At an earlier point in the Introduction,she emphasises that however vast, the collection is not a ‘definitive work,implying that everything excluded merits lesser consideration. I prefer to see it as a contribution to the cause of reclaiming for women of African descent a place in literary history. If its effect is to spur others on to do better, it will have achieved its purpose.’

This year, on 8 March 2019 International Woman’s Day, her
much-anticipated New Daughters of Africa: An International Anthology of
Writing by Women of African Descent was released by Myriad Editions
(UK). On 7 March, the eve of Women’s Day, Myriad and editor, Margaret Busby,
threw a party attended by a good many of the 200 contributors from Africa and
her Diasporas, thirty-six of whom are mentioned in this tiny Nigeria dominated sample.
It also features their pre-NDoA credentials for entry into the pantheon
of writers. They are arranged in the volume (not in this sample) according to
decade of birth primarily, writes Busby, ‘to give context to the
generational links’ and to continue to chart the black feminist literary
canon:

Warsan Shire cannot be
excluded from my sample. She is the Somali-British
writer whose poems about the female body, failed romance, sexual imposition,
sex workers, migrants, are shot through by a searing, palpable sense of loss, dislocation
and disorientation.In her poem ‘Home’,
Shire speaks of the violence and anguish of the condition of refugees
fleeing war in images that will leave you gasping. Her career was launched in
2013 when she won the inaugural Brunel African Poetry Prize. Three years later,
she catapulted to international fame with her collaboration with Beyoncé. Lemonade,
the R & B singer’s Grammy Award-winning album, features lyrics by
Warsan Shire, who is one of ten poets selected for Complete Works II,
a national development programme promoting diversity and quality in British
poetry.

Occupying positions of
pride on my list are Spanish-language writers
Agnes Agboton (Republic of Benin) and Trifonia Melibea Obono (Equatorial
Guinea). Agboton is long established. Translated pre-NDoA by the gifted
American Lawrence Schimel, three poems from her collection, Songs of the
Village and Exile, originally written in her native Gun, sit in this
anthology alongside ‘Let the Nkúkúmá Speak’, a translated short
story by Trifonia Melibea Obono. She is author of La Bastarda, which
was published in 2018 by Feminist Press (USA) in its original Spanish. In the same
year, South Africa’s Modjaji Books published the novel in English. Lawrence
Schimel served as translator for both Obono’s NDoA short story and her
novel, which is the first book by a woman from Equatorial Guinea to be
translated into English. About lesbian rebellion in Fang society, unsurprisingly
La Bastarda has been banned in Obono’s home country. Banned books
have power: in 2018 Trifonia Melibea Obono won the Global Literature in
Libraries Initiatives (GLLI) Translated YA Book Prize.

A major achievement of
Daughters of Africa is its power
as an advocacy tool for indigenous-language orature.Busby’s
introduction contains a memorable
quote from June Jordan, an American contributor to the original volume: ‘If
we lose our fluency in our language, we may irreversibly forsake elements of
the spirit that have provided for our survival’. Using translations of
indigenous-language poems to kick off the anthology, is Busby’s means of
demonstrating that the creative output of African women has ‘roots that
extend beyond written records’. In New Daughters of Africa translated
works underscore the case for dismantling, through the translations of texts,
barriers erected by Africa’s breathtakingly diverse ethnicities and those
barriers created by colonial imposition of European languages. An impressive
consensus has emerged across the continent and its Diasporas that we need to
speak and listen far more to one another through our writings. Sharing stories
across our borders, comparing our experiences in the world as African women -
and men - will help us know one another. In an article published in The Guardian
UK on 9 March 2019, a day after the launch, Margaret Busby quotes
translator Renée Edwige Dro, director of Danbé at L’Harmattan, Ivory Coast, and
contributor to the book. “It was as if the daughters of Africa
featured in that
(original) anthology were telling me, their daughter and grand-daughter, to
bravely go forth and bridge the literary gap between francophone and anglophone
Africa.”

Busby also quotes Phillipa Yaa de Villiers,
South African Commonwealth Poet (2014), whose response to the original Daughters
of Africa, is particularly moving:

“We were behind the
bars of Apartheid – we South Africans had been cut off from the beauty and
majesty of African thought traditions, and Daughters
ofAfrica was among those works that replenished our starved minds, connecting
us to theBlack planet of memory and
imagination, correcting the imbalance of information and awakening our own
potential in ourselves...(the anthology) brings our separate spaces on the
planet into each other’s purview, our experiences accented by our geographical
and historical conditions, a text that creates solidarity, appreciation and
reminds us that we are never alone”

And these socialand intergenerational
considerations can yield economic good: badly needed revenue from books
translated and traded not only to the Global North and within it, but
translated and traded here across our vast geographies: our Anglophone,
francophone, hispanophone, lusophone, Italian, German, Dutch and indigenous
language-speaking communities.

In May 2017, Myriad Editions merged with New Internationalist, a
long-established Oxford (UK) based co-operative and publisher of the anthology
of The Caine Prize for African Writing. The merger is a
testament to Myriad’s subscription to the campaign for increased visibility for
African writing in the world’s biblio-diversity. In 2018, the Myriad
First Drafts Competition focused on women of African descent. The two winners,
Anni Domingo and Rutendo Chabikwa, have contributed writings to New Daughters of Africa. Publishing
Director Candida Lacey is an English woman. Her collaboration on the first DoA while working
for Jonathan Cape and the publication of NDoA by Myriad Editions, which she leads, are a statement of her
support for increasing diversity in the publishing industry, something Busby
has championed, notably as founding member in the 1980s of Greater Access to
Publishing (GAP), which sought to increase black representation in British
publishing. And today, she is still advocating the cause.

In
the Acknowledgments section of NDoA, Busby tells us that she met
Candida Lacey in 1989. She was working at that time at the feminist publishers,
Pandora Press, which had just brought out An Anthology of British Women Writers.
She and Lacey ‘...talked of the
need to rectify the absence of
black women from the literary canon...’

Jonathan Cape in
1992. Myriad Editions in 2019.Candida Lacey is not fighting for us; it is the
feminist press that is standing with us. Why this matters is summed up in the
2017 Bloomsbury publication Why I’m No Longer Talking to White
People About Race, Reni
Eddo-Lodge’s fierce, moving polemic. The chapter entitled The
Feminism Question is the challenge she has thrown to her readers.
They include white people who dare to brave her text. The chapter demonstrates
why the inclusion of black women is imperative in the fight to protect women’s
rights to participate in relevant spaces. Responding to the controversy
generated by an all-white all-women TV show in 1990s Britain, this is the
statement Reni Eddo-Lodge has made:‘When
feminists can see the problem with all-male panels, but can’t see the problem
with all-white television programmes, it’s worth questioning who they are
really fighting for.’

Once again my cyber world is under siege and I am
celebrating. Conversations between Daughters of Africa and their networks of
friends; photographs from the launch events; links to traditional media
publications around the release of NDoA have been pouring into my inbox
and my news feeds:

Irish Times journalist Sally Hayden recognizes
New Daughters of Africa as
broaching the neglected 'feminist lineage' that is a fact of
African history. She quotes Chimamanda
Ngozi Adichie speaking about her great-grandmother, ‘who she is sure
was a feminist, whether or not she used that word for it. ’Hayden quotes Minna Salami: ‘When someone says that feminism isn’t African, we are
reminded that we do not have the historical proof to show how continuous our
presence is on the continent.’

Nigerian anthropologist and author Ifi Amadiume contributed a piece to
the firstDaughters of Africaanthology, from her workAfrikan
Matriarchal Foundations, aiming to demonstrate and provide such proof. But the excerpt is minimal.As reinforcement what she
should have provided was a selection fromMale
Daughters, Female Husbands: Gender and Sex in an African Society,her
exciting study published in 1987 by Zed Books (UK).The
Foreword by Pat Caplan explains how on arrival in South-East Nigeria, colonial
rulers and missionaries found existing gender-fluid systems ‘baffling and
sometimes abhorrent… As a result women in areas like Nnobi lost much of their
former power, (for example) the ability of an older woman to marry “wives”
whose labour she could command, was curtailed. Women were increasingly domesticated
and rendered invisible, a situation exacerbated by the increasing importance of
the cash economy, which was largely dominated by men’. To get a
copy, click here

The firstDaughters of Africa is dedicated to Margaret Busby’s mother. New Daughters of
Africa as a follow-up
testifies to the importance she has placed not only on tracking a canon of
black feminist writing but additionally, mapping the canon through
intergenerational connections. That Angela Davis should participate in the
Women’s Day 2019 events launching theNew Daughters of Africa; that Gladys Casely-Hayford alongside her mother, Adelaide
Casely-Hayford, should feature in the originalDaughters of Africa; that Zadie Smith and her mother, Yvonne Bailey- Smith,
should both feature asNew Daughters of Africa; that Rebecca Walker should be a contributor to the
follow-up of the firstDaughters of Africa through which her mother, Alice Walker, speaks to her - these
facts look like stardust sprinkled across a magnificent project built of so
many stories: personal stories permeated by ‘an awareness of the wider world, and of the impact of
national and international politics’; stories driven by history‘rememoried’; stories
addressing migration, ‘specifically ‘Windrush
stories’ typified by the writing of
Andrea Levy ... an inescapable reference point in the British-Caribbean
nexus...Stories of mothers separated from offspring, and the resultant
psychological effects...’

Historically, swathes of Africa have been populated by women on the
frontlines of religious, intellectual and political life. Women have led the
family and the economy and have been fighters in armed conflict. Those who
succumbed to the hype around Marvel Studio’s Black Panther in 2018 will
remember actress Danai Gurira as a soldier of theDora Milaje. A redeeming feature of a facile composition, these
Wakanda warriors,'the adored ones', are modelled on the Dahomey Amazons, an all-female
military regiment of the Kingdom of Dahomey (now Republic of Benin).In the Fon language
of Dahomey they were known asMino, 'Our Mothers'. Reputed for
the courage and audacity they displayed in the First and Second Franco-Dahomean
Wars, the Amazons disbanded at the end of the 19th century when the kingdom became a French protectorate.
The sample I have provided is a window onto an historical lineage:Minoof
African and Diasporic history. When Africa’s new daughters look back, it is in
their memory. As women, as writers at home and in the Diaspora, they are our
inheritance: the transformational power of what they have written and their
acts, fuel us as we journey.

In
her Guardian UK article of 9 March 2019, Busby points out that the
anthology starts: ‘... with some important
entries from the 18th and 19th centuries – a reminder that later generations
stand tall because of those who have gone before. Nana Asma’u (1793–1863), a
revered figure in northern Nigeria, spoke four languages and was an educated
and independent Islamic woman whose life and work can be considered a precursor
to modern feminism in Africa. Sarah Parker Remond (1815–1894),abolitionist,
lecturer, suffragist, demonstrates many of the themes and serendipitous
connections that characterise this anthology... Elizabeth Keckley (1818–1907),
her life bridging the 19th and the 20th centuries, describes first-hand the
trauma of enslavement in her autobiography,Behind the Scenes: Or,
Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House, published in 1868 – exactly
100 years before the “mould-breaking year” that
(writer) Delia Jarrett-Macauley refers to, when “on university
campuses from Paris to New York, students were protesting against the old
order, against bureaucratic elites, against capitalism, sexism and racism and
all forms of authoritarianism”.’

Ifi Amadiume’s contribution
in the originalDoA fromAfrikan Matriarchal
Foundations,contains an interesting sub-section entitled‘Patriarchy
Versus Matriarchy’. Here she describes the activities of the
Aho Cult of the Nnobi community of South East Nigeria and contends that its
activities symbolise a gender based struggle for power:‘the
incursion of a patriarchal people on an indigenous matriarchal society’.

We wrestle male hegemony at home; in cultures in
which we live across the globe, we fight it, challenging reductionist
perceptions of ‘others’ and the racism bequeathed by Western imperialist
thought. So,New Daughters of Africa is political: an
orchestra of responses toMinoof our history who took
the fight to slavery, colonialism, to all forms of oppression and exclusion.
The writings are part of the consensus around ‘non-colonising
feminist solidarity across borders’ advanced by Indian scholar
Chandra Mohanty. In Myriad and Busby’s 200-strong literary army this solidarity
has found a powerful African expression. As its arsenal, 800-plus
pages of memoir, short stories, speeches, novel extracts, poetry and journalism.
The totality advances an intergenerational, transnational feminist agenda. At
once a war-front, a home-front and a sanctuary for our souls, the page is where
Africa’s literary daughters wield our pens like swords to stake our claim to a
true feminism whose power, urgency and truth can be found only at gender’s
intersections: colonialism, race, culture, class, sexuality, history and
nation. To get a copy, click here

AFTERWORD

Tribute to Margaret
Busby by Ade Solanke

On Saturday 6th July, at Africa Writes 2019, Margaret Busby was awarded the
inaugural Africa Writes Lifetime Achievement Award in Africa Literature.
[Africa Writes is the annual literature festival hosted by the Royal African
Society and held at the British Library in Euston, London].

The
award was
presented to Margaret Busby by Rt. Hon. Diane Abbott, MP & New
Daughter of Africa, after an introduction of the award by Adeola Solanke
FRSA. The author/playwright of Pandora’s Box delivered this tribute to Dr. Busby:

“Thank you Africa Writes, the RAS,
and the British Library, for inviting me to be part of the launch of a new and
exciting tradition at Africa Writes.

It’s
a terrific honour and a privilege to be here at this, the eighth
Africa Writes festival, to announce the first Africa Writes Lifetime Achievement in African Literature award.

The Lifetime
Achievement in African Literature will honour and pay tribute to those who
have made a
major contribution to African literature. Founded in 2019, it will be
awarded at irregular intervals to writers, academics, publishers and
translators, with careers spanning 30 years or more, in recognition of
their life-long achievement within the field of African literature.

The award comes about because
of the first recipient actually. About a month ago, I made a chance
remark to Sheila Ruiz, about just how wonderful a certain person is,
and she said “yes! We should celebrate that!!”

And that certain
person has
kindly joined me, as Diane Abbott has, to pay tribute to writers We’ve sadly
lost in recent years: Buchi Emetcheta and Andrea Levy. And at those
tributes we say to each other, “why did we wait till they were no
longer with us to thank them?”

This, the 2019
inaugural award, honours a
doyenne of the literary world, and the world of African arts and letters
in particular who, fortunately, WILL be with us for many years
more. I’m thrilled to announce that the 2019 The Royal African
Society Africa Writes Lifetime Achievement Award goes to Margaret
Busby OBE, Hon. FRSL (also titled Nana Akua Ackon).

Margaret, a
major cultural figure in Britain and around the world, has a career
which actually spans, not thirty, but fifty years – and, as we’ve seen with
the impact of the new DOA, is still going strong. She is
a trailblazing publisher, writer, playwright, editor, broadcaster, literary critic, and overall staunch
advocate for diversity in the arts.

Her wikipedia page lists most of her incredible
accomplishments, and I must add that wiki itself hosts many pages she’s
unilaterally created herself for others - including mine! So you can read the
full extent of her magnificent work there.

In closing, I’ll
quote from a comment by one of her admirers, Jak Beula, founder of Nubian
Jak.

“Dr Margaret is a
living legend who has planted seeds in the most amazing and unexpected places.
Her tireless dedication has not yet been fully appreciated due to her
humility. But her like we have not seen in Britain before, and will not again
for many a generation. Had she been from the US she would be world famous.
It’s up to us to honour her during her lifetime.”

I’d now like to
call on the Right
Honourable Diane Abbott MP, Shadow Home Secretary, to help us do just
that and to present the award.”